Unlikely NSA scandal winner: Orwell’s ’1984′

As life imitates art and we find out just how closely “Big Brother” is actually watching us, George Orwell’s dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four has seen sales skyrocket.

Originally published in 1949, one edition of the novel has seen a 4,566% increase in sales since news of the National Security Administration’s telephone records surveillance program was disclosed by former CIA agent Edward Snowden.

With the revelation that the federal government is collecting data on the habits of domestic telephone customers in an unprecedented scope, the theme of surveillance, taken to an extreme in Nineteen Eighty-Four, is hitting close to home for many Americans.

Similar practices seen as invasive or, well, creepy, by governments are often dubbed as “Orwellian,” but one wouldn’t normally expect such a direct correlation to book sales, however, it’s not uncommon. NPR points out that sales of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged took off during the 2008 banking crisis as readers similarly reached for foreboding fiction.